Thursday, March 15, 2007
Story last updated at 03:30 a.m. on Thursday, March 15, 2007

Naming places after living politicians can be embarrassing

By GIOVANNA DELL'ORTO
Associated Press Writer

ATLANTA - As Rep. Cynthia McKinney was preparing to leave office after being ousted by voters in her own party, a state lawmaker proposed striking her name from a major thoroughfare that runs through her former district.

"The reason is her track record, the fact that she has done things that are embarrassing," said state Rep. Len Walker, whose district borders the Atlanta-area district once represented by McKinney, the state's first black congresswoman.

McKinney has long been controversial. She once suggested the Bush administration had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks but kept quiet to allow defense contractors to profit from the aftermath. More recently she scuffled with a U.S. Capitol Police officer. Still, the Cynthia McKinney Parkway in DeKalb County, just east of Atlanta, remains named after her.

As the parkway illustrates, naming public infrastructures and buildings after living politicians, particularly those still in office, can be fraught with the potential for embarrassment, and a lot of costly changes.

"Their legacy isn't even established yet," said Derek Alderman, a cultural geographer at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C. "They are more susceptible to the politics of the day."

Or to the conviction of the day. In South Carolina, many clamored to have former lieutenant governor Earle Morris Jr.'s name removed from a stretch of highway after he was convicted on security fraud charges in November 2004. Investors in the firm he led and its parent company lost $275 million when the companies collapsed.

Thirty years after Morris was bestowed with the highway honor, his name was replaced with South Carolina 153. The state's Transportation Commission approved the change four months after Morris was convicted.

"It was a sad day ... but that's what people wanted," said commissioner Marion Carnell, who represents Anderson and Pickens counties, where the highway is, and had served in the state legislature with Morris.

Ohio University recently was in a similar quandary. In December, its Board of Trustees scratched the name of former U.S. Rep. Bob Ney from an athletic facility on its St. Clairsville, Ohio, campus, a month after Ney resigned from Congress and pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges. The former Robert W. Ney Center for Health and Physical Education is now the Ohio University Eastern Campus Health and Education Center.

In Chattanooga, Tenn., the same fate nearly befell the University of Tennessee. In 2005, lawmakers filed a resolution to name a new engineering building after state Sen. Ward Crutchfield, but dropped the project after he was indicted on federal bribery and conspiracy charges.

The university is considering naming the building after a funder, spokesman Chuck Cantrell said.

Donating big cash - or earmarking it from public budgets - is usually how living individuals, especially politicians, get their names onto roads, bridges and buildings. For example, some 40 structures have been named after Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., in his home state.

In return for their buck, politicians get highly coveted name recognition.

"Almost anybody who drives in West Virginia sees Byrd's name," said Josh Hagen, a geographer at Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va. "Name recognition is a big plus for a politician. All place-names create a kind of invincibility."

That advantage, particularly useful at re-election time, and the possibility of embarrassing changes, have prodded some legislators to introduce bills that would prevent naming public structures after living people.

That tradition is well established for federal projects, an exception being the Ronald Reagan National Airport outside Washington, which was named after the former president left office, Hagen said.

But far from every state regulates the naming of public structures, and just a few deal specifically with living people and active officials, said Kae Warnock, a policy analyst with the National Council of State Legislatures.

A proposal to prohibit naming buildings after living public officials never made it out of committee in the Arkansas Legislature this year.

In Georgia, a flurry of requests for name changes prompted a legislative committee to rule in 2003 that only people with national or regional recognition who have been out of office for two years or are deceased can be honored in such a way.

The McKinney Parkway was named in 2000, so it's grandfathered in. Since then, McKinney has routinely gained attention for her contentious comments, including accusing former Vice President Al Gore of having a "low Negro tolerance level" and denouncing former New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani's refusal of $10 million from a Saudi prince for families of Sept. 11 victims.

McKinney lost a Democratic primary runoff election in August, five months after striking a police officer who asked her for identification before entering a House building.

It appears her name will stay on the parkway at least for the next year. A resolution to change the name back to its old designation, Memorial Drive, is still pending in the Georgia House and doesn't appear likely to advance before the end of this year's legislative session.

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